Web applications are increasingly showing recommended users from social media along with some descriptions, as an attempt to show relevancy. Existing techniques show a user profile biography as a summary for an expert, for example. Previous work on user summarization or social profiling of users has focused on topical personalization. This includes topic models on user content and qualitative models on user profile data, both of which are used for segmenting users on various attributes (e.g., engagement, personality, etc.) and categorizing users into various classes.
Existing analogous work to user summarization is document summarization. Document summarization has been studied for longer textual documents. In both cases, however, there is an information gap, since the research community has mainly focused on structured and formal language content to understand context.